Nancy Duarte of Silicon Valley presentation fame has a video here discussing how to effectively present webinars.
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IBM has made a stop motion animation by moving individual molecules. Ars Technica has an article about it here.
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A 9 year old boy's imagination runs wild.
Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick.
The website for this and a worldwide project is here. The project goes from September until October 5th. Their goal this year is to engage 1 Million Kids in 70 Countries in Creative Play.
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Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC.
Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.
This is an inspirational video. There are many good ideas and demonstrations in this video. At around 29:25, Bret shows the creation of an animation sequence both with Flash and an iPad app that shows some remarkable insights into a possible animation UI.
Bret's personal site is here.
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Kahn Academy has opened a new section of the educational website to teach computer science here. It is reminiscent of the instructional approach of Seymour Paper's Logo language teaching from 1967. The key here is the use of generated animation to teach programming skills. The fact that Kahn Academy's system used JavaScript is brilliant in that the programming and display environment is available in any web browser.
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As seen in a Mashable article here, the Japanese Ministry of Defense has invented a spherical flying machine. It is a beatiful concept.
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As pointed to by a tweet from @brucesharpe, automatic modification of photographs has reached an awsome level as indicated by this:
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From the Korea JoongAng Daily in association with the International Herald Tribune here comes an article about Korean film director Park Chan-wook who just won best short film in the Berlin International Film Festival for his 25 minute film "Night Fishing" which was shot on an iPhone.
The film's $136,363 budget was funded by KT, the exclusive iPhone service provider for Korea.
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Kodak stopped making Kodachrome film last year. The last facility to process the film in the world will process the last roll today because they have run out of the chemicals. I would not know about this story except for a tweet by David Pogue here.
This was the film that recorded many moments of my family's life growing up. My father shot Kodachrome slides mostly with a Kodak 35mm camera and we spent many evenings looking at them being projected in a darkened room. He used Kodachrome all of his adult life. With my father's great skill at correctly guessing exposures it captured many fond memories. His camera did not have a light meter. He used his eye and many years of experience.
RIP Kodachrome.
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In 2007 Hans Rosling appeared at TED and showed an amazing display of stats that were actually interesting. That video is here. Below is another, more beautiful example of a similar idea with higher production values.
The video is from a BBC show called "The Joy of Stats."
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Don't tell David Hockney.
He has an exhibit of his iPad work at the Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation in Paris.
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Shop Vac from Jarrett Heather.
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For some interactive installations that most people might think require Flash, some people using Macs use Quartz Composer instead. The most sophisticated example I've ever seen is shown
. It has 10 40" touchscreens, each run by a 27" iMac. I've used Quartz Composer to create simple graphic composites but I've never seen anything like this.
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Gruber here points to a fantastic Isarithmic* visualization by David B. Sparks here of how the national distribution of presidential Republican and Democratic votes shifted from 1920 to 2008. The video captures the transitions in a way that illustrates the power of well designed time based media and taught me something about our political history.
* Yeah, I had to look it up too, here.
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From Bruce Sharpe here comes a link to an article on cnet here about HDR video. Soviet Montage Productions of San Francisco has found a way to combine video from two Canon 5D mark II's, one over exposed and one under exposed into HDR video. While we wait for true HDR imagers, maybe someone will rediscover the techniques used by Technicolor for film and older video cameras of using a prism to split an image to 3 imagers with different settings or simply use neutral density filters. Video with dynamic range that exceeds the human eye can't be far off.
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For the first time in a long time today's Apple special event was streamed live. Above is a photo of 3 devices playing the "live" feed. As you can see, they are showing 3 different images. That's because Apple's HTTP streaming technology does not guarantee simultaneous delivery of content, only the high likelihood that it will get there soon. Soon in this case seemed to be a delay of about 30 seconds from live for the first device (usually the iPhone for no apparent reason) and the others trailing at a random interval of up to maybe another 30 seconds.
Highlights:
iOS 4.1 (next week) - bug fixes, High Dynamic Range photos!!
iOS 4.2 (November) - iPad update, WiFi printing
iPod shuffle - got buttons
iPod nano - got smaller, has touch (but not iOS), lost the camera
iPod clasic - never mentioned, still in the store
iPod touch - 2 cameras, FaceTime, retina display (like iPhone 4), video editing
iTunes - Ping social network, TV rentals, AirPlay
new AppleTV - $99, no apps, no storage, Netflix
The full capabilities of AirPlay are unclear to me just yet, but one thing it will allow you to do is stream content from your iPad to your AppleTV.
The presentation was cool. There are a lot of details that I don't understand yet. It will be interesting to see how they pan out.
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Tom A. Warner shows us what lightning looks like when you slow it down an incredible amount.
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